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Are we rebuilding the centralized web, minus tracking?

Posted on 2023-05-16

It has been some time since my last gemlog entry (or blog post for that matter)… Mainly because real life and work has been crazier than usual… I've managed to stay more or less up to date with content I wanted to read, but not with my writings… But when free time is more limited than usual, priorities and choices must be made ^^.

/!: This post contains what I believe will be a very unpopular opinion about bubble and how gemini is getting more centralized and dependant on a small number of users / services, if you disagree and might get angry, ignoring this post may be the best :). I don't expect response to this post, so don't force yourself either. /!\

I was intrigued by a post on Mastodon from @Skyjake earlier about his new project called [bubble]. As usual with him, I was impressed by the idea and the quality of the project itself. That being said, one thing I don't like is again the centralization it creates. I already discussed a long time ago about centralization in the gemini space in my [1 year of gemini] post and in my [first post about gemini mention]. And I believe this new cool tool that bubble is will make that state worse. This post focus a lot on bubble, but most of it is true for a capsule like [station] (which is also why I've stopped posting on it and only lurk there and sporadically give a small response or "like") or others.

Having all these use cases into one place seems awesome and I definitely see the benefits of having gemlog / tinylog / station / reddit / issues tracker / … in one central place. That simplify a lot of things and make browsing this space faster. It also help create a lot more interaction between geminauts. It is open source which is awesome (my main grief against station for example), but without federation (is that even possible in the gemini space?), it means that only one instance will be relevant: the one where most users will go. In this case, most probably on the official geminispace.org capsule. To be fair, I don't really care who might be the "winning instance", because my issue is more "philosophical" than because I'm afraid of a bad actor. There is nothing to "gain" really by having the full ownership of the protocol anyway, thanks to the protocol limitations.

@skyjake did think about "interoperability" though, with gemini feeds and tinylog formats, so people not interested in joining could still access content from their preferred tool. That is awesome and I thank him for that! Granted this is true only for accessing and reading content. To interact with others, one will need a local account.

To be honest, I didn't really want to write this post at first but I saw earlier while browsing geminispace.org [a message from gritty] about federation:

food for thought on bubble federation and wider use: I watched people discuss all the time in Lemmy how that despite it being federated, most folks gravitated towards the original lemmy.ml site because the people and content were there. it's lonely in tiny federated silos, so I understand, so my hope is that other implementers of Bubble use its other features and are able to draw enough community to their own projects in order to distribute

And @skyjake's response was:

One unique Gemini-specific angle to consider is that gemlogs are already sort-of-federated via Antenna and other aggregators. Bubble posts can be published to Antenna just fine. Maybe the Bubble server just needs to subscribe to Antenna or Cosmos and have everything pour into All Posts as remote entries. 🤔

IMHO, and this is the key message from this post: Aggregation is not federation. Aggregation is about a place where I can see things posted from everywhere. If ew0k decides to stop his [Antenna service], then no content will be lost. Only the aggregation page will be. I could still find the capsules aggregated there (or on any other aggregator). I have a capsule aggregating [all (known) French speaking capsules]. If I stop that service, it will just be less easy to find French content, but they will still be there. Aggregators brings back the feeling of the early web with "planet" type of website (or, in more "recent" technology, the [indieweb]). They are not mandatory pieces, just helping with discoverability and access to content. If geminispace.org is stopped however, then everything in there is lost.

Don't get me wrong, I have nothing but great respect for @skyjake! I'm browsing the gemini space thanks to [Lagrange] (both on desktop and mobile) and [cosmos] is the first page I look / refresh when browsing gemini! I love seeing such creativity while still being "limited" by the protocol. I don't think gemini should be static only or that user certificate shouldn't be used for authentication. On the opposite, I enjoy seeing this kind of use case for services like [astrobotany] and many others. It just brings me back too much to the "mid days" of the web, when we stopped using it as a peer to peer network with some aggregation services and started using only a few centralized services like Google (and then social media).

Maybe it has to be this way? Maybe that's the only way for less technical people to still enjoy and embrace fully the gemini protocol? Maybe people care more about interaction than centralization? Maybe I'm just wrong and my problem is about not being able to go back to the early days of the web? Maybe I'm overthinking this too much? Maybe not enough? Maybe I'm being to harsh? Maybe I just don't know?

Well, that last part is definitely true, I only know that I know nothing… So I'm going to stop this post/rant here and apologize if anyone felt bad reading this post. In particular @skyjake or @martin, yes I criticized your tools, but I do appreciate you both and am really grateful of what you allowed the gemini space to become :). No hard feelings, just my 2cts about what I like and don't like for the future of gemini.

PS: To anyone reading this, please don't send insult or hate via email (or other) just because I disagree with your point of view. It already happened here before (you'll recognize yourself ;)), might happen again… But remember before pressing "send", this post only express my own oppinion… And hopefully, without any disrespect to anyone :).

Stay safe.

=> bubble | 1 year of gemini | first post about gemini mention | station | a message from gritty | Antenna service | all (known) French speaking capsules | indieweb | Lagrange | cosmos | astrobotany

=> /gemlog/

=> Send me a gemini mention | send me an email!